


Some Blushing Hours

by okaynowkiss



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, M/M, Pining
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-26
Updated: 2015-10-17
Packaged: 2018-04-23 10:53:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4874038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/okaynowkiss/pseuds/okaynowkiss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve's mom died when he was thirteen, so he had to grow up early. At sixteen, he's a bit of a loner: studying hard and waiting for the next phase of his life to start. He gave up on fitting in at school a long time ago, but when his childhood best friend Bucky Barnes shows up in his math class one day, things get complicated.</p><p>(A high school AU about being young and sad and trying to love people anyway.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Don't I Know You from Somewhere?

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much to [cabloom](http://cabloom.tumblr.com) for generously and expertly beta reading <3

The summer heat still hadn’t broken by early September, at the start of the third week of school. Barely six fifteen in the morning and the air was humid, cicadas calling loud in the trees, as Steve dropped the heavy trash bags onto the curb. And he was only wearing the t-shirt and mesh shorts he’d slept in now, bare feet stepping carefully through the grass; when he left for school he’d have to be in jeans and the sun would be out. He didn’t mind the warm weather, particularly, but he wished autumn would hurry up and come so he’d have some proof time was moving.

Everything felt like it took so long sometimes.

He hurried back into the house, checking the clock in the entryway as he went. Pretty early still. So he could slip back upstairs and—

Foot on the first step, he heard the coffee machine in the kitchen gurgling to life. He winced: too late.

He went in to face the music.

“Hi, Grandma,” Steve said, and returned the hug she gave him. She smelled like her pressed powder, clean and safe, like always.

“Good morning, sweetheart. You’re up awfully early,” she said with a hint of sarcasm.

“I’m meeting Sam at school,” Steve said, which was true. It _was_ true. He took his time getting eggs and butter and bacon out of the fridge, and then got down the frying pan and set it next to them on the counter.

“You know, I can take the trash out myself,” his grandma said, for the hundredth time, as she started cooking. “And you certainly don’t have to wake up at dawn to—”

“I know,” he interrupted, “I’m just trying to help!”

She said “Hmm,” and left it at that. This was a relief to Steve, because sometimes at this point she would tell him that he was already the most helpful teenager who’d ever been born, and that she was seventy-five, not an invalid, and in perfectly good health. All of which was pretty embarrassing, and much of which wasn’t true.

They talked about the project he and Sam were working on for History, and gradually the remaining weirdness of the trash thing passed. His grandma was old, certainly, but mostly he didn’t have to think about that. If she was just cooking and going to work and everything. But when he had to watch how the size of a trash bag dwarfed her, and how clearly it was hard for her to lift something heavy over the rim of the trash can—it was enough to make you want to cry, so he avoided it whenever possible.

 

+

 

Sam was already in the classroom when Steve, still fixing his hair where it had been flattened by his bike helmet, walked in. The room was empty otherwise, forty-five minutes still before the bell for home room, not even the teacher in yet. He bumped Sam’s offered fist and pulled out his book and notebook. “What’s up,” he asked Sam.

“Waking up for this _sucked_ ,” Sam said, “We should’ve just done it over the weekend.”

Steve shrugged. “Whatever. It’s like forty-five minutes. And this way we didn’t have to do homework on a Saturday.”

Sam waved a hand and then stifled a yawn. “We could’ve done it before the movies on Saturday! If you would’ve _come_ —”

“Aww, is somebody very sleepy?” Steve mocked him, and mimed rubbing at his eyes with his fists. Blatantly dismissing Sam’s point. This conversation was easy enough, but the truth was that Steve knew their friendship was precarious. He didn’t like to go out on the weekends or after school, and Sam was going to get fed up eventually with the weird limits of their friendship. But it was a good thing now, while it lasted, and Steve was going to enjoy it.

“Easy for you, Rogers, you don’t have to run football drills for an hour after school later.”

“Nobody has to do that,” Steve said, dry, and Sam laughed. It was always easy with Sam.

Sam clapped the palm of his hand against Steve’s desk—thwap-thwap-thwap. “So let’s get it done.” He made exaggeratedly impatient _come on_ motions while Steve found the page. Steve gave him an equally put-on unimpressed look.

Sam was always so physical, always knew where to put his body in relation to other people, to Steve. Making jokes with it, touching objects in a way that made them somehow inviting, better for being closer to him. A novelty to Steve, whose limbs were always in the wrong place.

They flipped through the reading and made notes for their project, and made plans to do the same thing tomorrow morning to finish it off, before it was due Wednesday. By the time kids were streaming in and taking their seats, they were finished and talking about what TV they’d watched last night.

Steve felt something knock into his shoulder, not very hard, just careless and on purpose. He turned and saw Alexander Pierce moving down the row to take his seat, his backpack hanging off his arm by a strap. That was what hit Steve. Sam made a face after him and rolled his eyes. “Anyway,” he said, and went on with their conversation.

There were some kids who had never grown out of that young, mean phase of being cruel to Steve. It was low key mostly, like that, and ignorable. Steve was constantly aware that he should try not to make extra trouble for his grandmother. He didn’t want to get written up at school, get a phone call home, get suspended or expelled. His instinct was to prickle and fight, but he didn’t have to do it just because it was his instinct. And it was fine. He could avoid it. He could ignore stuff like that. Anyway, it almost made people leave him alone. It couldn’t be that fun to taunt him when he rarely responded. Probably one day it would just stop.

 

+

 

If he drew her, he would want to draw her quickly. The lines would have to be fast, instinctual, to capture her. Studying it wouldn’t work.

He wasn’t going to draw her, barely even doodled in class, but still Steve slipped often into these daydreams. Ms. Hill was reviewing the Pythagorean Theorem, or she had been the last time he’d tuned in to the chalkboard or her voice. Whatever it was, they were still safely in the territory of reviewing stuff they’d learned last year, so Steve didn’t worry about paying attention.

A student had walked in and was giving Ms. Hill a piece of paper, and during the pause in the lesson Steve let himself sketch, only in pencil, the lines of her jaw, neck and shoulders. Fast and light, in the back of his notebook. He tore the page out as soon as he did it, crumpled it up, and shoved it into his backpack.

“But I go by Bucky,” the new boy was saying.

“Okay, glad to have you, Bucky, take that desk in the back,” Ms. Hill said.

The words filtered into Steve’s distracted thoughts slowly. It was a strange name and he’d known someone named Bucky, once, a long time ago.

Steve adjusted the hood of his sweatshirt and glanced around the back of the room as unobtrusively as he could. The new boy was turned, getting settled, rummaging around in his backpack. He emerged holding a pen and—

Steve wouldn’t have recognized him right away if he hadn’t heard the name first, but—that was Bucky, all right. His hair was wavier and darker than it had been, and his face had thinned out. Steve turned back to the front of the room, irrationally embarrassed, and didn’t hear a word anyone said in those last ten minutes before the bell rang.

They’d been _best_ friends. As good as brothers. Sleepovers, tag, hide and seek every night until the streetlights came on, Bucky’s backyard as familiar to Steve as his own and vice versa, every stone and worm and blade of grass, Bucky keeping him company on the other end of his couch during the long days when he was too sick to go to school, Bucky’s sisters who pounced on him and asked him to play and wanted to show him what they’d learned in ballet that day, like Steve was their brother, too—

It was crushing, when Bucky’s family moved. Lonely. Steve thought Bucky might have written him one letter, maybe, could almost see the large untidy handwriting and the drawing of a plane... Had he written back? He couldn’t call it to mind.

They were kids. Seven years old. They didn’t keep in touch.

Anyway, things had happened since then that shrunk that loss in comparison. Made it childish, insignificant. Mostly: his mom got sick and never got better. He didn’t know if it was better or worse than someone dying suddenly, like his dad, because he barely remembered that one.

Bucky wouldn’t suddenly be his best friend again, or anything like that. But Steve had a weird anxious feeling he couldn’t identify, of wanting Bucky to like him, to know him again.

The bell rang and Steve gathered his things as everyone shuffled out. Darcy turned around in her seat in front of him and tapped his desk with her pen, which she held out to him. His pen. Right. “Thanks,” she said crisply. Her version of self-deprecation: you just said everything very matter-of-fact, like you knew to the second degree of irony that what you were doing was slightly ridiculous. “Owe you one.”

He took the offered pen. “Call it even. You gave it back and all.” She also borrowed a pen from him about three times a week, and seemed to only _not_ do so when she felt she’s done it too frequently, at which point she’d turn to one of the other four people who sat right around her instead.

“Well, you know.” She slid her notebooks off the desk and into her shoulder bag so they made a satisfying plop sound when they landed. “Owe you a class worth of ink, anyway.”

“Hmm,” he said noncommittally.

“Walking to lunch?” she asked.

Across the room, Bucky stood facing away from them, talking to Ms. Hill at her desk. He definitely didn’t know who Steve was yet. No one had said Steve’s name in class and he hadn’t been called on, so it was unlikely Bucky would’ve noticed him. Also, it was unlikely because Steve had spent the class slouching and making himself as small as possible—not hard, as skinny as he was—with his head ducked, and trying not to be noticed.

Bucky had to remember Steve, right? When he came to school today he must’ve thought at least a little, _I wonder if I’ll see anyone I know from before?_ He must’ve thought of Steve—right? Steve was going to have to talk to him sooner or later, but...

“Um,” Steve said. Lunch was an invitation Darcy gave almost daily, and one that he hadn’t accepted so far this year. “Sure.”

Her smile lit up her face and she shrugged her shoulders, like lifting the corners of her mouth had tugged them up, too.

So he sat at lunch with her and a _lot_ of her friends (who were at least acquaintances of Steve’s, too) instead of eating with Sam and Bruce while playing cards as usual. Rhodey and Thor and Clint were playing a game to see who could make one of the other two laugh while drinking something, and they were all tied with Successful But Nobody Spit.

Darcy chatted with Steve the whole time, including in the lunch line, and Steve hated himself for appreciating it. He didn’t want her to feel responsible for him, but clearly she did, because she was a kind person. Darcy’s friend Jane sat on Steve’s other side, and greeted him like they were already friends: “Hey, Steve! How’s it going?”

“Pretty good, you?” he replied, trying to match her tone.

“Oh, good, too bad we don’t have math together anymore though. I’ve got Osborn now and it sucks.” They’d had math together last year—which Steve was borderline surprised she knew and remembered—but she was now in the AP class, which Steve wasn’t. It was hard to imagine she’d have any trouble with it, even if she didn’t like the teacher. She was the top student in every math and science class he’d ever had with her.

“Yeah, Ms. Hill is cool,” he agreed. “There’s going to be so many extra credit questions about aircraft.”

Jane laughed. “That was the best, wasn’t it? I learned so much about fighter planes because of her last year. Like, more than I learned about math. Well, more new stuff,” she said, and then stopped short and shook her head, smiling like she was embarrassed with herself for saying it.

“Do you think she changes the theme every year?” Darcy piped up.

“Hope not. We’ll see on Friday,” Steve said. Their first math quiz of the year was scheduled for that day.

Darcy wrinkled her nose, and Jane said, “Ugh, _we’ve_ already had two quizzes, and we’ve got one Friday, as well.”

“That’s why we’re going to the movies Friday night, though,” Darcy said. “Steve, you should come too, it’ll be fun. We’re going to see who can sneak in the weirdest food.”

“Oh, I can’t,” Steve said vaguely. He didn’t even hang out with Sam outside of school if he could help it, so he certainly wasn’t going to join this big, established friend group on one of their regular hangouts. He’d learned a long time ago that big social events, middle school and high school stuff, didn’t suit him. He wasn’t cut out for acting like he liked anyone he didn’t, and he definitely wouldn’t put up with anyone being straight up rude to him. Things were different now, somewhat, because he was at this table at all... But he’d spent a lot of formative years getting beaten up, called names, and scrapping, and the remnants of that stuck to him.

“Boo,” Jane complained. “You don’t have to do the food thing. I don’t do it. I mean, I bring in a bottle of water, but I’ve been told—”

“That doesn’t count!” Thor said from across the table, suddenly interested. “It’s not even sneaking. You’re allowed to bring in water.”

“Whatever, you’ll be eating Sour Patch Kids out of my bag like always,” Darcy said, grinning at Jane over Steve.

It was fun, having lunch with them. Talking to Darcy was always fun, she was so bright and happy and seemed to like how sarcastic Steve could never help being. He was glad the invitation thing had petered out quickly, though. It was uncomfortable to turn down something again and again. Especially when part of him wanted to just go with them.

Near the end of the period, Clint dramatically won the drink-spitting game by lunging at Rhodey while the latter was drinking water. He spit it out, partly on Clint, and cracked up.

“Lunch duty! Rhodes, Barton, both of you.” Their principal’s deep voice came from out of nowhere. Steve hadn’t even seen him walking around, nor did he know why the principal of the entire school would be covering a lunch period. There were so many students at the high school that by rights you should never even see the guy, but he was always popping up when you least expected him. “And clean up that water,” Mr. Fury added, before striding purposefully across the loud cafeteria toward the exit.

Thor was gleeful at having escaped punishment for the game. “You did lose, though,” Clint reminded him, sort of wiping up the water on the table with a napkin that immediately soaked through.

The boys went to do their lunch duty—pushing around the big wheeled bins that collected everyone’s trash—still poking at each other and giggling.

Darcy was sat back in her seat, brazenly typing away at her phone. You could get away with it at the end of lunch, when everyone was up and walking around to throw their stuff away and return their trays.

Jane was looking through her planner and transferring notes that looked like Chemistry from a spiral notebook.

“You should sit with us tomorrow,” Darcy said, without looking up from her phone.

“Oh,” Steve said. “Um.”

“Bring Sam and Bruce.”

Steve looked at her for a long minute, until she blinked away from her phone and up at him. “What?” she said. “Or don’t bring them. There are too many boys at this table, anyway. Not you,” she added immediately. “I will kick any of them—” a nod to the two vacant seats and Thor, now resting his head on his arm and looking at Jane— “out. No problem. Say the word. Thor, Thor you’re kicked out.”

Thor looked away from Jane reluctantly. “Then I’ll sit at the table right behind you and keep my chair pulled back so far you can’t get out of your seat,” he said.

Darcy raised her palms skyward helplessly and started laughing. _“What_? Why is _that_ what you would do?”

The bell rang and she giggled with Thor as they all made their way out of the cafeteria, waving goodbye to Steve at the doors.

 

+

 

Somewhere on the other side of the cafeteria during that same lunch period, Bucky had arrived late and with newly assigned Trigonometry in his backpack. He’d sat alone near the end of a long table, and ate and read some of the paperback book he’d brought to school, and a few people he’d had classes with that morning came up and chatted to him. He hadn’t seen anyone he particularly remembered from elementary school yet, but the high school’s district was bigger and he thought everyone seemed nice enough, and overall he wasn’t having too bad of a time moving back to the first place he’d ever lived. The circumstances were shitty, but he’d always liked it here when he was a kid.

His three afternoon classes dragged by. He’d been on summer vacation for a bit long, and wasn’t in school mode, yet. It helped that everyone else was already settled, at least. He just tried to act like them. He looked for Nat in each new class, but no luck. She might end up being in one of the morning ones he’d missed today, though...

In English a girl sitting next to him talked to him a little and giggled more than was strictly necessary, and he wasn’t particularly interested in her but it made him smile to himself when he was walking out of class. School was okay. He was good at all of it, usually, academics and social life and athletics. He found his way back to his locker, and had to look at the combination written on his hand to get into it.

He was just standing with backpack on, trying to remember which way the parking lot was from here, when he saw the blonde boy across the hall. The guy was tossing a pen into the air and catching it, and he was talking to his friend about something that required him to do a lot of dramatic eye rolling. He was a couple inches shorter than Bucky, and kind of skinny; growing, though, if his too-short pants were any indication.

There was something magnetic about him. The lines of his face were thoughtful, captivating. He kept, like, grimacing in annoyance at whatever he was talking about. And he had this really full bottom lip—

And then the boy caught Bucky staring, stopped talking mid-sentence, and immediately blushed. That was interesting.

And then the boy said, “Bucky?” and smiled tentatively. And that was something else.

“Sorry,” the boy said, and beckoned his friend to follow him over to Bucky across the hallway. “It’s um, Steve. Rogers,” he added.

His friend—taller, athletic-looking, black—said “Hi” to Bucky, too, and Bucky nodded at him, but he couldn’t quite get his head to catch up to what was happening. His confusion must’ve shown on his face, because the blonde boy began to look worried. “Bucky, right? Bucky Barnes?”

Bucky gave a single nod. But this couldn’t be Steve Rogers, because he’d asked his mom if Steve’s family still lived here and she’d said no.

And it especially couldn’t be Steve Rogers because Bucky had just been really, really obviously checking him out.

Bucky felt a vague sick, swooping feeling in his stomach. Of course it was Steve, his floppy hair and blue eyes and scrappy frame—

“It was a really long time ago,” Steve was saying, pushing bravely on even though it was obviously excruciating for him to have to explain who he was like this. The blush still colored his cheeks. “We were... seven, I guess, and we both lived on Lehigh Street, when you guys moved...”

“Sorry,” Bucky said quickly. Steve’s friend was looking unimpressed with Bucky, which Bucky thought was fair. “I have to—” He gestured over his shoulder, muttered, “See you,” and split.

He’d chosen the direction at random, but it turned out to be the correct way to the parking lot. He found his car in a daze and sank into the driver’s seat. He put his head in his hands for just a few seconds. He could wring his own neck. “Jesus. Fuck,” he said to no one, and started the car.

 

+

 

“He’s on the football team,” Sam told him the next day at lunch as he slid into his chair, annoyed.

“Who?” Steve asked, although he didn’t need to.

“Your friend with the memory problem,” Sam said.

It was half embarrassing, half gratifying, how strongly Sam had reacted to the whole thing yesterday. It wasn’t like _Steve_ was going to let himself act upset about it, so it was kind of nice that Sam had been pissed. “What a dick,” he kept saying. “Who acts like that?” But Sam’s heat had the ring of pity, and that was almost worse than whatever Bucky had done.

“Whatever,” Steve said. “Can we just forget about it?” So someone he hadn’t known for a long time hadn’t been very nice to him. So his stupid fantasy of getting his old friend back had turned out to be just that. So what? It was no huge shock, barely a loss.

“It’s your turn,” Bruce said, nodding toward the pile of cards in the center of their lunch table.

Oh. Right. Steve played quickly just to do something with his hands, although he had a better card that he noticed a second later. It was worth it to lose if they moved on from this topic.

Darcy had invited him to lunch again, and even made a little sad face when he turned her down, which she usually restrained herself from doing. But it would be awhile before Steve wanted to talk to anybody new again.

 

+

 

It was the end of the day and he was on the crowded sidewalk heading to Sam’s car with him when Bucky caught up to them. “Hey! Steve, Sam,” he said and matched their pace.

Sam raised his eyebrows at him, but said, “Hey,” because he was basically a polite person.

Steve wasn’t, and didn’t say anything.

“I’m really sorry about yesterday,” Bucky said to him. He was being serious and looking right at Steve, and Steve really wanted it to end.

“Okay,” Steve agreed.

“I remember you. Obviously. It’s been so long, and it’s so... weird, to move back here, I guess. I don’t know. Anyway, I’m really sorry. It was just... a weird first day.”

Sam had stopped walking and seemed receptive to this, because he was a bad friend and a traitor.

Steve had no choice but to stop walking too, and join the two of them. Up close, Bucky was electric with nerves. He seemed so crushed that even Steve kind of wanted to be nice about it.

“I’m really sorry,” Bucky blurted out, again, when nobody said anything for a beat. He looked down and scuffed his shoe over the gravel. He was hiding his eyes, looking at the ground, but Steve saw him make a complicated expression, mouth pulling to the side, and for whatever reason, that clinched it.

“It’s fine,” Steve said, dropping the attitude. “Really. Don’t worry about it, okay?”

“Thanks,” Bucky breathed out, and smiled at him. Still a little nervous.

“We should—” Steve said, and jerked his thumb toward Sam’s car.

“Look, do you want to hang out sometime?” Bucky offered. It was real: relieved, friendly. He glanced between Sam and Steve; the question was for both of them.

Sam shrugged at Steve. “Sure,” he told Bucky.

“Yeah, sure,” Steve chorused, comfortable with the certainty that he wouldn’t have to follow through on it. “We have to go, though,” he added, gesturing to the car again.

“Right. Okay, later,” Bucky said, and with a “Later,” from Sam, he headed back toward the school.

 

+

 

Friday after last bell, at the locker he shared with Sam. The hallway full and loud, kids bouncing with barely-contained weekend energy. Metal doors slamming shut, shouted laughter, backpacks zipping, an administrator around the corner calling “Let’s go, guys!” at the crowd.

Steve wanted to get on his bike and go home, and wanted to talk to Sam, who was usually here by this point. He was going to give it up and go when he heard “Yo,” from behind him, and there was Sam bounding over, dropping his books in the locker Steve had left open for him.

And there was Bucky, a step behind him. He lifted his hand in greeting to Steve and shrunk apologetically behind Sam against the wall of lockers, not imposing himself. He knew he still wasn’t Steve’s favorite person.

“We just have practice for an hour,” Sam was saying to Steve. “And then we were going to do something later, I think some people are going to see a movie? Thor and them.”

“Cool,” Steve said. Half interested, because actually Darcy and Jane had already invited him. But only half: he definitely wasn’t going. “Hey, do you have my Chem notes still?”

“Oh, shit,” Sam agreed, “yeah. Here—” He dug the notebook out of his bag and leafed through it, spread open on one palm, then handed over the pages he’d borrowed. “Thanks.”

“No problem. All right, later,” Steve said, and waved at both of them. Before he got more than a step away, though, Bucky said,

“You should come later.” Leaning still against the locker, casual, waiting for Sam to sort his stuff out and being low key about the invite. Still guilty, probably, for the other thing. “We’re going to meet up at my house and I’ll drive us over. I told my mom you went to school here; she’s all excited to see you again.”

“Really?” Steve asked. Mrs. Barnes appeared in his mind as he’d seen her last, an unexpectedly sweet memory of that time. Chicken parm, that was what she always cooked on Fridays, the day Steve had slept over at Bucky’s house almost every week in the first grade. Bucky’s sisters always getting time-outs, which they would giggle through, for kicking each other under the dinner table.

Bucky latched onto this, aware he’d hooked Steve. “Yeah. She has like, fond memories of liking you better than me.”

Steve laughed a little. “Right.”

Bucky wasn’t leaning anymore, poised a step closer to Steve. Sam shut his locker and turned to them. “Does your mom remember me?” Bucky asked Steve.

The noise in the hallway reached a fever pitch, so loud you had no choice but to ignore it, no way to tune in to all the voices, someone playfully shoving someone else a few inches away from them. Between the three boys there was a beat of silence.

Steve looked at Sam and tilted his chin a fraction, in answer to something Sam didn’t need to ask. Sam said to Bucky, “I’ll see you at practice,” clapped a hand on his shoulder, and left.

Steve felt bad for it, but there was no other way to go about it. He met Bucky’s questioning look and said, “Bucky, my mom actually died a couple of years ago.”

Bucky’s face went confused, more so than when he’d “met” Steve earlier this week. And then he raised a lip in anger. “What?” he asked, with some bite behind it.

Steve nodded. No way to soften it except time. He wouldn’t have ever said anything, certainly wouldn’t have said it right away like this, if there had been any option. So he watched Bucky, who probably had the same friend-mom memories Steve did, as his face fell. “Steve,” he said, and then tried to say something else and didn’t.

“Yeah,” Steve said, looking down the hallway in the direction they both had to walk, toward the locker room and bike rack. “Come on,” he said, and Bucky came.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Bucky asked.

“I just... did?” Steve said slowly.

“No, like,” Bucky said, and Steve had to turn back to him because he’d stopped walking in the middle of the stairwell. Bucky’s face was still screwed up in concentration, and to Steve’s shock there were tears streaming down his cheeks. “Why didn’t you tell me when it happened?” he asked. He dried his face with two quick swipes of his hand, tears still falling.

Steve was too surprised to speak at first. Was this the same person who’d run away rather than talk to Steve just a few days ago? “I—come on, it was years after you moved. How could I—?”

Bucky shook his head and pulled his hand across his face again. Kids were pushing by them on both sides, trying to get around the block in traffic. Bucky didn’t seem to notice. “I don’t know. Just. That _sucks_.”

Steve didn’t know what to say to that, really, because it did suck. It also kind of sucked to watch your childhood best friend experience your mother’s death in real time, but he didn’t want to be a jerk when Bucky looked so upset. He shrugged apologetically. A lame response, but Bucky calmed down a few degrees.

“Sorry,” he said to Steve, “about your mom and...” A vague gesture: this, the current situation.

“It’s okay,” Steve said. His voice came out small. For a second under Bucky’s gaze he was five years old again, and Bucky too was the boy he’d seen cry dozens of times, the same blue eyes, red rimmed.

They set off together down the stairs, and waved goodbye at the locker room door. They were quiet, and didn’t manage to look right at each other. Steve went on to find his bike and go home, and maybe curl into a ball on the couch and think about crying for just a few minutes.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NEXT TIME: Steve and Bucky go to the park.
> 
> I'm on tumblr @ [okaynowkiss](http://okaynowkiss.tumblr.com), talk to me!


	2. Playground

Bucky appeared at lunch next week, sliding into a seat next to Bruce. “Hey, what’s going on?” he said in greeting, and when Bruce said hello back Steve realized that they’d already met. Sam greeted Bucky happily, too.

“You want to play cards with us? It’s Bullshit,” Sam offered, when Bucky looked interested. “Do you know that one?”

“Yeah, I think so. Sure, let’s play,” he said. And only then, he glanced at Steve and said, “Hey, Steve,” but by the time Steve looked over Bucky’s eyes were on the cards Sam was dealing.

“Hey,” Steve said, but the moment had passed and he felt dumb.

He was suddenly aware that Bucky had an easy friendship already with Sam and Bruce, and _didn’t_ have one with him. There was some tension that came with his presence that Steve couldn’t read and didn’t know if he was projecting.

Lately, when they’d talked at their lockers, Steve had found himself thinking: Bucky was always in the wrong place, standing too close or too far away.

But they played cards and ate, and it was normal, it was fine. Bucky rarely looked at Steve for long, but he didn’t ignore him and wasn’t being rude and Steve didn’t know if he was imagining things.

No one else seemed weird about it. He was making more out of it than there was; he had to be.

 

+

 

Did he want to be friends with Bucky again? He kept thinking about it while he was laying in bed that night trying to get to sleep, as much as he told himself it was stupid and pointless to dwell on it. He watched the streetlight come in through his blue plaid curtains, the pattern of the fabric mostly indistinguishable in the dark. Shadows of tree leaves moved across his ceiling when cars passed outside. It was still hot, but they’d turned off the AC for the fall so his window was open, and he could hear the breeze snaking through the trees.

He couldn’t stop replaying the times he’d seen Bucky during the last few days, and the way Bucky acted around him. Like he was uncomfortable. There was the time at lunch, and then in Math every day, Bucky would just sort of smile tightly at Steve—as though for the sake of being polite without feeling behind it—and then not talk to him.

It made Steve’s stupid heart ache.

Because what was so different about him? Why could Bucky not relate to him the way he seemed to relate immediately to Sam, to Bruce, to the student body as a whole?

Bucky laughed easily and often. He was sarcastic without being mean; approachable without being naive; and good-looking without being arrogant. Steve knew, from the way Bucky used his eyes and mouth in casual conversation and in class, that he was aware that he was good looking. He was always giving people a look like he knew exactly what they were thinking and was in on the joke.

Probably, the thing Steve wanted back was gone forever. Their childhood friendship was unrealistic now.

Steve was who he was. (Kind of a loner, as he put it to himself. Independent. Principled. But also inept at and uninterested in the kind of social life most kids his age seemed drawn to. School was fraught for him; he had a constant low-level distrust of other kids in general, stemming from the more difficult middle school years when Steve truly hadn’t had any friends. That was also the time, when his mom was sick, when he decided that he had to stop being so involved in the muck of the school social hierarchy. Who was mean to him, and who didn’t feel the same way about him that Steve felt about him or her. It all just led to him either getting in a fight or getting hurt in another way, and really, what was the point? Life wouldn’t always be like this, it couldn’t, but if this was the way it wanted to be now, well, fine, but Steve didn’t have to participate. He wanted to be a good person. He wanted to do something good with his life. He believed that in the grand scheme of things, not going to school dances wasn’t going to matter much.)

And Bucky was... well, Steve wasn’t sure. A football player, but so was Sam, and Sam was all right. Already well-liked around school even though he was new. Rumored to have dated some super-hot girl over the summer. When had he even moved here?

Whoever he was, he was interesting to Steve. No way around it. And Steve kind of wished there _was_ a way around it, because it seemed like trouble. It seemed like a big empty thing in his chest where before there had been nothing, but not nothing in a bad way. Just a neutral nothing.

God, Steve hated caring about this. There were so many better, more real things to worry about. Getting into a good college and getting scholarship money. Not getting into fights at school. Not being a burden to his grandma. Not disappointing his mom.

Feeling like he was kind of a loser shouldn’t rank on the list. All the same, Steve flopped onto his back and kicked his legs around under the covers to try to find a more comfortable position in which to fall asleep.

He wanted something from Bucky, and almost more powerful than that desire was his competing desire to not want that thing.

Steve hated, _hated_ relying on other people. He had to be able to get by on his own because he was often on his own. Everyone was. It was one of the truths he’d learned early on, and then kept learning with increasing severity throughout his life. The universe had really knocked him over the head with that one.

Still. You had to keep living. Steve knew that, too, because his mom taught it to him. And so maybe it was okay to want an old friend back in his life. His mom had always liked Bucky; he felt sure that if she was here she would tell him that he owed it to himself to find out if any other their old friendship was still there.

 

+

 

Steve found himself hoping Bucky would ask him to hang out again, and unsure what he’d say if it happened. Washing the dishes with his grandma later that week, she put her hand on his shoulder after he dropped his third piece of silverware. “Steven,” she said, amused. “Would you like to share whatever’s got you so distracted?”

“Um.” He blushed and ducked his head to cover it. “Nothing,” he said quickly. He didn’t like to be rude to her, but he wasn’t sure how to explain what he was feeling.

“Okay,” she said. And there was a pregnant pause while she dried a glass, drawing the dish towel over it even once no water remained. When she continued, her voice was soft. “You know. Sharing what you’re feeling with someone else helps, even if it seems like the last thing you want to do. It really can help.”

Steve looked at her, his eyes big with guilt. He hated making her worry about him; it was so ungrateful. Her forehead creased and her wrinkles stood out on her skin when she was really concerned about him, as she was now. “Sorry, Grandma, I know. I, um... I don’t know. I’m just thinking about, like, friends at school, and stuff?”

Her face cleared a little and she smiled at him encouragingly. “Sounds like tricky stuff. Are you and Sam having an argument?”

“No, not Sam. And not an argument. I guess I don’t hang out with that many people usually, huh?”

She gave him a fond look, then wiped her hand on the dish towel and touched his hair, smoothing it back from his face. “Anyone you’re friends with is lucky to have you,” she said seriously.

Steve smiled at her and rolled his eyes. “Yeah, okay, Grandma. Thanks.”

 

+

 

Middle school was the worst of it.

Steve didn’t have friends from sports because he didn’t play any, and didn’t have friends from the neighborhood because everyone knew him as the small, sick boy who spent most of his time with his mom.

Steve lost the rare friends he did make by being totally unwilling to keep his mouth shut, no matter the circumstance. Saying “Would you shut up?” loudly to David Glenn in class when the other boy was whispering and laughing at a girl whose name Steve no longer remembered during her presentation. He called it doing what was right. Standing up to bullies. Guidance counselors called it disruptive behavior.

Steve was not the easiest person to get along with.

David had been his friend, and was basically a nice person. He was pale and wore huge glasses, and knew the answer to every question the teacher asked in class. He got teased mercilessly by some of the other kids, but he had noticed that it was usually possible to transfer their attention away from himself by giving them a new target. That day, when Steve spoke harshly to him in class, David was avoiding the other children’s teasing about his own pink shirt by pointing out that the girl giving a presentation had a slight lisp.

Steve had never had any tolerance for that kind of weakness.

He was familiar with the linoleum floor, having been shoved to it so frequently by kids passing him in the hallway. He tried not to get in fights because he was always getting in trouble for it, but if someone pushed him first, he had to go up to them and push them back. And so his nose was often bloody, he felt like he was in the principal’s office as much as he was in class, and his mom gave him a number of serious talks about how violence was wrong. And when she was first sick and Steve was scared in a way he couldn’t understand, a big, new way, he knew he had to stop disappointing her. So he reigned himself in, and stopped squaring up to other kids, because in his experience more often than not it ended in shoving. He got quieter, got in trouble less.

He remembered Eighth Grade vividly. It was all mixed up in his mind with his mom and the hospital. She’d come back with a smell of chemicals, of thin air, trailing her like a ghost that faded but never vanished entirely. And that was the year he didn’t have any new clothes, and in fact was wearing mostly hand-me-downs from a neighbor who dwarfed him. Other kids, as though afraid of the sadness and desperation that enveloped him, seemed unable to be compassionate toward him, as though if they did they would be infected with his problems, too.

This would have made more of an impression on him if his mom wasn’t halfway through the slow process of dying.

As it was, it was easy enough to decide not to care anymore about making friends, being popular, being socially successful at school. It was just not the most important thing.

And so he decided: leave it for everyone else. They could keep it.

 

+

 

At Newspaper after school on a Tuesday afternoon, in the middle of September, Steve finished the article he was writing about the fundraising drive for new football equipment. It was deeply boring stuff, as most everything he wrote for their paper was. Mr. Jameson assigned topics if you didn’t pitch something, and Steve never pitched. He wasn’t incredibly interested in the student paper, honestly, but he was a little short on extracurriculars and it seemed like a good idea to keep going with the only one he’d done every year. College application time was less than a year away.

He emailed his finished article and waved goodbye to Mr. Jameson. He walked through the hallways slowly on his way out of the school. The place was nice when it was empty. It felt both bigger and smaller than usual, without the crowds of kids. The linoleum floors stretched uninterrupted to the far ends of the halls he passed, and the lines of lockers were patient as they waited to be opened tomorrow morning.

He heard laughter from the classroom up ahead, and then a few kids emerged, with Ms. Hill. She waved goodbye to them and headed for the faculty parking lot. There were two boys and a girl heading for the doors at a slower pace, milling around and talking as they went, far ahead of Steve. He recognized Bucky’s backpack and hair, and then his deep, pleasant voice drifted back to Steve through the echoey hall: “I think it’s supposed to be next Friday,” he was saying to the girl, drawling the first syllable of _Friday_. “The Tigers.”

Steve bit his lip, keeping the same distance between himself and the kids ahead. Probably Bucky was busy. Still, they were both here, so he might as well...

He caught up a little to the others and said, “Bucky,” to get his attention.

Bucky turned, eyebrows raised. “Steve!” he said happily when he saw him. He stopped so Steve could catch up, and the other boy called “Later,” and continued out, but the girl he was with paused a couple steps ahead, not sure if she should wait or not. “What’s up, what are you here late for?” Bucky asked him, looking him up and down, a lopsided smile on his face.

“Oh, just Newspaper,” Steve said, and his eyes flicked over to the girl, who was avoiding looking right at him.

Bucky looked over his shoulder and waved to her, friendly. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said, meaning that he wasn’t walking out and she didn’t need to wait.

She shrugged, and kind of raised her eyebrows. “See you.” Turned and left. Just the slightest twinge of annoyance to her exit.

Steve raised an eyebrow at Bucky, who looked over his shoulder to make sure she was mostly gone, then looked back at Steve and shrugged, with a face like _whatever, I don’t know_. “What are you doing here?” Steve asked him.

“Peer tutoring,” Bucky said, and waved a hand dismissively. “It was just an interest meeting. I don’t know if I’m going to do it.”

Steve nodded, and almost opened his mouth to say something before realizing he wasn’t sure what he wanted to say. Bucky’s eyes searched his face quickly and then looked down. His hands were holding both his backpack straps where they rested on his shoulders.

No one spoke.

It was like this with Bucky sometimes even when Sam was there, or Sam and Bruce at lunch, but when other people were there you could kind of ignore the awkwardness because sometimes the other people would say something too. Right now the two of them were the only moving things in the school.

“Um, d’you want a ride home?” Bucky asked then. His gaze was hard after he said it, waiting seriously for the answer.

“I have my bike,” Steve said, automatically. “I’m okay.” Bucky nodded at once, and Steve bit his lip. “But do you want to go to the park? Or something?”

“Yeah, totally,” Bucky said. His smile seemed relieved, like he’d been waiting for that to happen the whole time, and Steve couldn’t help smiling back.

Probably nothing had been weird between them before except for Steve.

 

+

 

They walked across the big, mostly empty parking lot together, leaving behind both Bucky’s car and Steve’s bike. “It’s pretty close,” Steve said, to have something to say. “McAllister Park, I don’t remember if it was built by the time you guys moved or not.”

“Don’t remember the name,” Bucky said. He walked with his hands shoved in his pockets, slouching a little and sticking close to Steve. He seemed... thoughtful, maybe. Looking around at the trees and the street like he was trying to remember them.

They walked the next few minutes quietly, but it wasn’t a bad silence. They turned off the sidewalk and took a path that cut across a grassy field and revealed the park, with its own small parking lot. Looking around, Bucky said, “Oh, I’ve been here!” They passed a big wooden sign with the name of the park and the year it was built, only five years back. Well after Bucky moved away.

Steve looked at him to see if he would go on.

“The other week,” Bucky said. “But we didn’t make it further than the parking lot. Doesn’t really count.” He was avoiding Steve’s eyes, and in his voice was a combination of embarrassment and pride.

It was a secluded parking lot, not visible from the street. Steve thought that over for half a second and decided it was safer not to pursue that topic any further.

“So... when did you guys move back?” Steve asked. He touched a hand to the back of his neck. He didn’t know why the question hurt a little, only that it did.

Bucky made a noise, _ugh_. “It was so weird.” They wound their way through the playground equipment. This area was for little kids: small metal and plastic animals on big springs that toddlers could sway on. But they gravitated here, maybe because there was no one else around. Bucky stepped up and balanced on one foot on the fulcrum of a little seesaw and then stepped deliberately forward on the beam so that one side dropped to the ground and he could walk down it. This one too was for toddlers; it didn’t tilt far in either direction. He stepped off and the seesaw sprang back to level. Bucky pulled the toe of his sneaker through the mulch and then looked at Steve, a sour expression on his face. “We moved in August, like a month ago. My parents got divorced, and my mom wanted to move back here.”

Steve grimaced in sympathy. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Bucky shrugged and turned away. He wandered over to a plastic jungle gym, too small really for either of them to use, and disappeared around the far side of it.

Steve hurt for him. He thought of the three Barnes kids hearing their parents fight, sitting upstairs in their rooms trying not to listen. He rested his hand on the bar of a merry-go-round and then swung it so the thing started to spin. Half-hearted at first, and then he pushed it harder. It was heavy, and didn’t go very fast, but was sort of satisfying anyway. “Get on,” Bucky said, appearing next to him, “I’ll push you.”

“You get on,” Steve said. The idea of being pushed like a little kid rubbed him wrong.

Bucky shrugged out of his heavy backpack and tossed it a few feet away from them, right onto the mulch. “Okay,” he said. He grabbed one of the bars and ran a few steps around the circle to keep up with it, then flung himself onto the spinning base of the merry-go-round as Steve pushed it.

Bucky maneuvered himself to half-lying on his side, among the metal spokes. He pulled as much of himself as possible toward the middle, to try not to slow down the spin. Steve gave a few more big shoves to keep it moving, but it was going slowly under the weight of someone several times bigger than its target audience. He felt dumb, but Bucky was already on it, so he dropped his bag on the ground, spun the merry-go-round one more time, and then hopped on, on the opposite side to Bucky, crouching at the edge of it. The force of the spin made him want to lean toward the center, but he leaned against the metal bar on the outer edge behind him and let the whole thing creak to a stop.

Bucky craned his neck to look over at Steve. “I asked my mom if you guys lived here. When she said we were moving. I know she kept it touch with your mom for a while, so I thought she might know...” He ran a hand through his hair and looked off into the distance. Across the playground, in the non-toddler section, there were kids swinging high on the swings, and some people shooting baskets on the court. “She said she checked. I guess, maybe she looked up your mom?” He said it delicately, like the words were cards out of which he was building a castle and if he placed one wrong they might fall. “Anyway, I didn’t know you were here.” He looked at Steve again, his face serious.

It sounded like it might be an apology, but Steve thought it would seem self-involved to acknowledge it. Instead he asked something else: “How come you didn’t start school ‘til the third week if you were here?”

Bucky made a pained sound. He flopped down onto his back and looked up at the trees. “Good question,” he said. Like he was wondering the same thing. “I don’t know, it was...” He trailed off and when he didn’t pick it up again after a second, Steve wanted to take back the question.

“Forget it,” Steve said.

Bucky shook his head and sat up. “It’s okay... It’s just...” He seemed to be debating something in his head, not sure how he should finish any of these sentences.

“Look,” Steve said suddenly. “Come on.” He scrambled out of the merry-go-round and snatched his backpack off the ground. Bucky followed him.

Steve led them to big swing set across the playground. The girls who had been swinging were leaving, walking toward the road with their mom.

Steve tossed his bag onto the ground and sat on a swing, and Bucky chose the one next to him. They hung there, hands resting on the chains, turning slowing in the air as they dug the toes of their sneakers into the ground. The playground felt familiar with Bucky there.

(Something Steve hadn’t thought of in years and years: the elementary school playground, sitting with Bucky on the two farthest swings, pumping their legs and pushing the swings as high as they could for the whole of recess. Other kids a blur below them. It felt like being free. It felt like what he was waiting for those times when he was too sick to leave the house.)

“Do you miss California?” Steve asked.

Bucky pivoted himself toward Steve and made a face. “Sort of. I mean, it was cool there. We moved a couple times out there though, so it wasn’t like leaving somewhere I spent my whole life, you know?”

Steve made a sound of agreement.

“What’s it been like here?” Bucky asked in return. “Tell me what I missed.”

Steve shrugged and half smiled. “Nothing much. They built this playground, I guess.”

“Sam said you live with your grandma...?” Bucky prompted. Gentle, but trying to keep the normal in his voice.

Steve nodded. The moment turned quiet, the first chill of fall in the air. “Yeah. I don’t know if you remember her. She lives where she always lived, in the neighborhood behind the diner and the credit union and everything on 178.”

“Yeah? That’s not that far from us.” Bucky spoke with an appealing drawl, stretching out certain words. Sometimes it seemed put on, like when Steve heard him talking to that girl earlier. And sometimes it was more subtle, just purely Bucky, just the way he talked.

Bucky looked down and took his phone out of his pocket, buzzing. He made a face at it and kept watching it ring. Finally, he flicked his eyes up to Steve, said, “Hang on,” and answered the call. He spoke fast and quietly. “Hi, Mom. ... Nothing, I’m at the park. ... Yeah. ... Yeah, I can. ... Okay. Okay, bye. ... Love you.”

“You have to go?” Steve asked.

Bucky nodded. “Yeah, I should get home.” But he didn’t get up immediately. He gave Steve an appraising glance, looked away, and then looked back and asked, “Do you not like Darcy and them? I know Clint can be a little annoying.”

“Wait, what?”

“You know. They ask you to hang out sometimes. But they said you never go.”

“I like them fine,” Steve said. “I just don’t really hang out with anyone from school.”

“I don’t get it,” Bucky said, and kept looking at him evenly and with interest.

“I don’t know,” Steve said. He was aware that if he made his circumstances sound too pathetic it would arouse sympathy in Bucky, which would be unbearable. Instead he shot for indifference. “I think I’m just used to it. I hang out with my grandma, I do my own thing. I don’t think about it.”

Bucky gave a brief nod. He looked straight ahead of the swing, hands resting on the chains, and said, “You should think about it.” His tone was as if he himself had asked Steve to do something, and Steve had refused, and Bucky was encouraging him to keep an open mind about the invitation. Maybe that was what was happening. Steve had dismissed, without thought, Bucky’s invitation to the movies the other week.

They scooped up their bags and made their way back across the playground toward the road. “Wait,” Steve said, “why do you think Clint is annoying?”

“Oh,” Bucky said, unembarrassed. “I don’t know. He’s fine.” He was unreadable, and offered nothing else. Possibly he had said it just as an opening for Steve to admit whatever he didn’t like about any of those people, but Steve doubted that. Steve had always liked Clint, in fact. The other boy was so easygoing, so quietly kind and self-deprecating. It was true Clint was sometimes drastically unprepared in class, to the point where it seemed like he would have to try pretty hard to be this disorganized. But it wasn’t actively annoying, or anything.

“You know Natasha?” Bucky asked, then.

“No,” Steve said. He thought Bucky’s question was rhetorical, and that he would quickly explain who she was and then launch into whatever he was going to say about her, but instead Bucky gave him a funny look.

“Natasha Romanoff?” he tried again. “She knows _you_.”

Steve tilted his head. He’d had maybe two classes with her over the last several years, and couldn’t remember ever having talked to her outside of class, and even then their conversations were only about the subject matter of the current lesson. She was very recognizable around school, right now, with the bright red hair. “Oh,” he said, stupidly. “Yeah, I guess. I mean, we’ve had classes together.”

“Well, I was just going to say. She introduced me to that group. She was, like, the first person I met here. So, I don’t know. I think they’re cool.”

“I’m not saying they’re not. Darcy’s great. Jane, too. And I don’t know the rest of them that well, but they’re all... fine,” he finished lamely.

Bucky looked ready to say something else, but then changed his mind. Instead he changed tack. “Here,” Bucky said, and drew his phone out. “What’s your number?”

Steve told him, and Bucky said, “Okay, I’ll text you so you have mine.”

Mostly to hide his face, and the fact that he was pleased and somewhat surprised that Bucky still wanted to be friends, even given their current conversation, Steve pulled his phone out of his bag to check it for Bucky’s text. It was there ( **yo** , with no punctuation). As were two missed calls from his grandma. “Oh, shit,” he said aloud. And in answer to Bucky’s look, Steve explained, “I guess I forgot to call my grandma and tell her I wasn’t coming home.”

In truth he had not known that was something he needed to do. He was only an hour or so later than he usually would’ve been after Newspaper, and if it was any other day of the week she still wouldn’t be back from work. On Tuesdays, the bank closed early. She was home and expecting Steve. He gave Bucky an apologetic face and called her back. She didn’t sound worried, just happy to hear from him, but Steve felt bad about it.

“Okay, well,” Steve said as he paused by Bucky’s car in the school lot on the way to his bike. “I’ll see you around.” He pushed a hand through his hair to get it out of his face.

“It’s kind of far to your house,” Bucky said, out of nowhere. His face was knotted in consideration, looking at the bike rack across the lot. “Should I just drive you home?”

“Um,” Steve said. He almost laughed. “No, I think I’ll be fine.”

Bucky raised a hand to say goodbye and ducked into his car.

And that was that, apparently.

Steve walked to his bike half amused, half confused. He rode his bike everywhere. He was used to it. Brookfield was not an especially big town. Bucky couldn’t think he really needed or wanted a ride home...? It was like he didn’t understand the idea of Steve riding a bike. Like he couldn’t quite believe it was real. But they’d just hung out together like... like friends. Like real friends.

There were no two ways about in: in the park with Bucky, that was special. And part of knowing that was knowing that Bucky felt it, too.

So Steve was pretty sure that Bucky didn’t think he couldn’t be trusted to safely ride a bike home.

It was just that Steve was worried that Bucky remembered a little too much about their childhood friendship. How frequently Steve had to go to the doctor. How he was allergic to so many things that any outing with him was a daring adventure. How so many times he’d been too sick to go and do whatever fun thing it was Bucky wanted him to do.

As a child he had been aware of people thinking he was fragile. He had not felt fragile, though, so he’d always hated being treated like he was. Bucky fell into that trap sometimes. Looking at Steve with his serious little face and saying, “Maybe we shouldn’t.” But they’d always had plenty of fun when they did it anyway. And rarely—rarely!—their fun would result in a visit to the hospital. Every childhood scrape was worse on Steve, who was not only tiny but also prone to lung infections and catching the worst possible form of whatever flu was going around.

He had for the most part grown out his health problems. He was still allergic to everything, so he had to be mindful of what he ate and carry an EpiPen everywhere.

And of course, he was still skinny.

He’d finally started getting taller, which, though a step in the right direction, mostly served to exacerbate the feeling he had that he was kind of gangly and funny looking. As a result, Steve did fifty pushups every day and ate a _lot_.

Steve clipped his helmet on and wheeled his bike out. He could see Bucky’s car turning out of the exit onto the road. He followed the path Bucky would’ve taken around the parking lot and made the same turn, and then turned onto his bike path a few blocks away and rode home.

The next day, in Math, Steve got called on and got a question wrong and then Bucky got called on and got it right, and when he turned to look, Bucky stuck his tongue out at him and laughed.

 

+

 

At the lockers at the end of the day on Friday, Steve found Sam and Bucky already hanging out when he showed up.

They were talking in low voices so as not to be overheard by the rest of the hallway, but were laughing and leaning against the lockers, expansively surveying the scene. They were acting like people were looking at them, in short.

Steve ducked behind Sam and opened their locker.

Sam was telling a story that Steve caught the end of: “So I’m like, what am I supposed to do about that, you know?”

“Yeah, that’s so typical,” Bucky agreed.

“Don’t say hi or anything, Rogers,” said Sam from behind the locker door.

Steve looked around it at him. “You seemed busy,” he said, in an ironic tone. “Didn’t want to interrupt anyone’s line of sight,” he added, with a nod of his head toward a crowd of three girls across the hall, also standing at their lockers, occasionally looking up through their eyelashes at the pair of boys.

“Interrupt it,” Bucky counseled, as Steve joined them. “It makes us seem more popular if people come up and talk to us.” Sam nodded seriously at this point. “And it makes us seem more interesting if it’s you.”

Steve made a face. “Why if it’s me?”

“You know. You’re... mysterious.” Bucky was squinting at him as he said this and then he burst out with a laugh. “Or I don’t know, whatever.”

Sam gave Steve a dubious look. “Sure. Whatever you say, man,” he said to Bucky.

“Whatever,” Steve said. He couldn’t work out if he was offended or pleased, but he was slightly flushed anyway. “Don’t you have practice?” he asked both of them.

“Cancelled!” Sam said, happily. “Coach is sick, or on vacation, or something.”

Bucky snorted. “Yeah, this is really not a football town. Not complaining!” he added, when Steve tilted his head. “It’s just funny.”

Steve hadn’t meant to imply that Bucky shouldn’t be complaining about anything, he just hadn’t thought of it quite like that before. But it was true, the town didn’t seem to care much about high school football games. He’d seen the stands less than half full on game nights, when he walked past the school field.

With the two of them, Steve became more present in the school hallway, more aware of the eyes of fellow students, girls and younger boys. He’d never been cool, and he wasn’t sure if this was that, but this was definitely something.

Walking past, an especially tiny-looking Freshman boy glanced up at them and then looked away quickly, back down at the floor.

“Anyway,” Sam said, “We’re going to a party at Tony Stark’s house later, if you want to come.”

“No thanks,” Steve said easily. He couldn’t think if he knew Tony. The name sounded familiar.

He felt the look between Sam and Bucky even though he was looking down at his phone at the time. Whatever. But they didn’t pursue it further.

And then from down the hall a girl’s voice called out: “Steve! Sam!” And a second after, maybe catching sight of him: “Bucky!”

Darcy was hurrying toward them, dodging around people in the hallway and waving, her long hair bouncing wildly. What could she be so excited about? But when she arrived, she just caught her breath for a moment, and then said, “Hey!”

“Hi!” Sam said. “What’s up?”

“Yeah, what’s up?” Bucky asked, and glanced in both directions down the hallway, although there was nothing to see.

“I just didn’t want to miss you guys!” she exclaimed.

A smile broke out over Steve’s face slowly. “Really? Because we were just standing totally still here.”

“Yeah,” Sam said, “like.” He gestured around them, joining in Steve’s teasing of her. “Not moving.”

“I don’t know,” she said, but she’d started to laugh. “I was all the way down there, and I figured you were just about to leave! It’s already 3:45.” She shrugged at them brightly and got down to business. “Anyway, I’m glad I caught you! We forgot, Fall Fair is this weekend. Let’s all go tomorrow, okay? Late afternoon. I’ll text you.”

Sam wrinkled his nose. “I can’t. I have to go to a family party.”

“Ugh,” Darcy agreed. “Okay. You guys?” She looked between Steve and Bucky. Steve was ready to be evasive, as was his usual style, but Bucky beat him to it.

“I’ll try to, I might have plans already,” he told her. Whether or not this was true (and Steve had no reason to think it wasn’t), Bucky appeared to enjoy the less available image it created for him, preening subtly.

“Yeah,” Darcy said, with the air of an eye-roll just underneath her words, “Natasha said she was going to meet you there, but it’s okay, she’s coming with us.” She blinked expectantly at him.

“Oh,” Bucky said, and visibly deflated a little. But he sounded happy enough about it when he accepted: “Yeah, okay.”

It turned out that Steve didn’t even need to answer, the conversation carried on as though, by not demurring, he had agreed. He should have corrected this, maybe, but he got caught up listening to Sam describe the embarrassing but kind of nice-sounding interactions with his more eccentric older relatives he was sure to have at his family party.

Darcy’s phone made a noise and she read a text, and then said goodbye to all of them and darted off again, the little wedge heels of her boots kicking up behind her as she went.

Bucky had become absorbed in his own phone partway through that conversation, and still was now, typing and presumably texting.

Steve said goodbye to the him and Sam, then left, a curious feeling in his chest like lightness.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NEXT TIME: The gang goes to the Fall Fair. At least two people kiss.
> 
> Continued shoutout to [cabloom](http://cabloom.tumblr.com) for improving the readability of some of the more ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ parts of my writing. 
> 
> I am still [on tumblr](http://okaynowkiss.tumblr.com).


	3. Fall Fair

At home that night, Steve was watching TV with his grandma when the three text messages came, all in a row. _NCIS_ was on at a low volume, and Steve’s mind was on other things anyway. From Bucky: **I wasn’t in school for a few weeks because my mom was going to send us to private school**

And while Steve was reading that, the second and third arrived one after the other:

**And then she found out we couldn’t go, because we hadn’t made a tuition payment on time or something**

**So she had to send us to public school last minute**

Steve held his phone close and read the texts over again, slowly. Bucky was continuing their conversation from days ago, a topic they hadn’t revisited since. Out of nowhere on a Friday night. Was he at the party? Was he home alone? Wherever he was, he was looking at his phone, just like Steve was.

Steve thought for several minutes and texted back, **Do you mind going to public school instead?**

 **Nope** , Bucky wrote back immediately. **I like it here**

Steve curled himself into a ball on the couch and stared at the empty text box in the message app. The desire to keep Bucky talking to him swelled and took shape in the form of messages he thought of but didn’t send. He wrote back **That’s good** , because he had to acknowledge what Bucky had said. But it would be very easy for the conversation to peter out there, so he also sent, **Are you home?**

**No why**

**Just wondered**

**At this party.** **Thinking about going home though**

**Not fun?**

**A little fun. Not that many good people though**

How short the conversation was, how terse, and yet how it colored the night. Steve imagined a setting for Bucky’s texting easily, although he had never been to Tony Stark’s house and didn’t know who would be there or what it would be like, really. But: Bucky would be alone on the back porch, looking out into the dark yard, the din of the music and voices from inside faint out here. He would be reading Steve’s texts with a kind of grateful interest on his face. He’d said there weren’t many people there he wanted to talk to, and he was texting Steve. Because he _did_ want to talk to Steve.

Steve painted a couple of posters that night for an event he was helping to organize on Sunday. A protest in front of Brookfield City Hall to convince the mayor to enact legislation that would prevent the construction of a new housing complex on some ecologically fragile land on the edge of town. Save the Rivers — The Next Generation Will Thank You, in big blue block letters. Threatened Bird Species Need Homes Too! And a handful of others. He would bring them to hand out so that the crowd would look unified and enthusiastic.

Steve thought local activism was important, but admittedly he’d lost some of his spark for it since Peggy left. It was so much more fun to march or sit next to her than to do it with strangers.

 

+

 

Steve and Peggy.

It was June. She was handing out fliers for a community action event. He was buying milk for his grandma. In the grocery store parking lot, they got to talking. Her outfit was proper, girly, a little conservative. Buttons done all the way up her blouse to a curved collar. But her clothes all looked soft and pretty, so it didn’t come off too serious. Her skin looked dewy and soft. Her hair looked thick and soft. Steve thought about touching her so much during their first conversation that he was amazed he managed to make plans to meet up with her at the protest at all.

And that voice: her thrilling, strange, lovely English voice. Steve had never talked to a British person before. He’d heard them on TV and everything, but mostly on like _Downton Abbey_. This was different. She was real. She teased and implied, she corrected and encouraged. At the protest, standing with signs in the crowd near the construction company’s offices, she listened to him explain about his mom, and she grabbed his sleeve and exclaimed, “Oh, _Steve_ , I’m so _angry_. I hate that that happened to you.”

She was staying in town at her cousin’s for part of the summer. The house turned out to be very close to the restaurant whose kitchen Steve worked in. Before his shifts he’d come over, her cousin out at summer school and the parents at work, and they’d make out, go get ice cream, make out, watch silly daytime TV shows in the air conditioning, and make out some more.

He thought she was very good to hang out with.

She reminded him how soon she was leaving to go back to England.

They were still Facebook friends, but he got the impression that she was too busy to spend much time on the internet, because she rarely updated her page but was tagged with some regularity in pictures at soccer games, birthday parties, Model United Nations conferences.

What was she to Steve now? A good memory, mostly.

 

+

 

That night he dreamed about Bucky. A strange, twisted up amalgam of him: Bucky’s hands spinning the combination of his locker assuredly. His laughing mouth, his sleepy eyes, kaleidoscopic. Pieces that in the dream he had trouble identifying. To whom did they belong? And yet the feeling he woke up with was one he knew immediately to attribute to Bucky: a kind of sparkling, aching warmth.

He also woke up hard, and touched himself before the dream-state could really leave him, so he was still half in it as he stroked himself faster and faster. He wanted to come so badly, but the stretched out, needy, grasping feeling of _waiting_ to come was especially sweet that morning, and he lengthened it by pausing halfway through and grasping the bedsheets for a few moments as he caught his breath. And then he took himself in hand again, and touched himself firmly, languorously, and got close again.

He almost always imagined Peggy when he masturbated, a habit he felt some guilt over and was trying to break. But that morning he was saved from that particular moral quandary by the pair of strong hands he imagined touching him instead of his own. He was at school, in the abrupt fantasy, but it was night and they were at the end of a deserted hallway. Someone was shoving him back against a locker, reaching into his underwear, talking close into his ear in a deep voice that reverberated through his chest.

He came biting his lip, arching off the bed just a little, breathless. It wasn’t usually so intense. The details of the fantasy left him as the details of the dream did, sifting slowly out through the day until they were unreachable. Later he would only know that he’d gotten off that morning and there was something even more blush-inducing than usual about it. It must’ve been good.

 

+

 

A text message that afternoon: **Hi it’s Darcy we’re going to meet up around 4:30 in the field behind the community center!** An octopus emoji after the exclamation point, with big eyes and four purple tentacles.

It was a fine early autumn day, breezy with a bright blue sky. Pleasant during Steve’s morning run. And at home he and his grandma had thrown open all the windows, letting the breeze float through the curtains. But was he really going to go meet up with Darcy, and everyone?

The thing was, Steve wasn’t so much of a joiner. He valued his independence. He didn’t fit in with most of the kids at school, he was never going to be popular, and he was _fine_ with that. That high school stuff, school dances and cliques, it wasn’t for him, he’d decided early. He was waiting for college, for the world outside of Brookfield.

Kids had been cruel to him when he was younger, yes, but he didn’t hold it against anyone in particular. It was just the way some kids were. But at the same time, he wasn’t going to deal with it if he could avoid it. So he kept himself close. He worked hard at school and focused on his future, and he was grateful, really grateful, for Sam, who was probably the best person Steve knew.

And where had Darcy got his number, anyway? Smart money was on Sam or Bucky, the only people he could think of who had it.

Bucky. Was he going to the Fall Fair with everyone else, after being evasive about it yesterday? What Steve would give for Darcy to text him again and tell him.

It wasn’t a big deal, going to the little town carnival—but it felt new and scary. He wanted to see Bucky, certainly, but he found he also wanted to accept Darcy’s invitation because it was generous and she was funny and kind, and he liked her.

And didn’t he like all of those people? Weren’t they strange and funny and just themselves, like he was? Weren’t they all weirdo outsiders?

Steve was sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of milk in front of him, staring so hard at his phone his eyes could’ve bored holes into it. His grandma startled him when she turned on the tap in the sink. She was in her gardening clothes and she brought the smell of fresh dirt into the room.

“What are you up to, honey?” she asked him as she soaped up her hands.

“Um. Some of my friends are going to the Fall Fair, I guess.”

“Oh yeah?” she said. “That sounds like fun. I always go to play a couple rounds of bingo. You and your mom used to go sometimes, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, we did.” They’d eat funnel cake and drink warm apple cider, and look through the shelves of used books, and play all the carnival games even though you almost always lost and even though the prizes, inflatable guns or stuffed animals the colors of nuclear waste, didn’t look very good anyway.

“You think you’ll go today?” his grandma asked.

“Yeah,” Steve said, “I guess I will.”

 

+

 

The Fall Fair. The gravelly parking lots in the middle of the community center and the library and the swimming pool were alive with carnival rides and food vendors, crowds and games and tents. The air bright and sweet with promise and the scent of cotton candy and fried foods. Music from the bandstand, a live jazz band of what looked like local dads playing. The grassy fields along the low, brick buildings were strewn with blankets and picnickers, families with children, mostly.

Steve found them under the willow trees. He spotted them at a distance, and picked his way across the field toward them, walking through the dappled sunlight on the grass. Halfway, his phone buzzed and he pulled it out to see it lit up with a text message, from Bucky: **You coming to this thing?**

He looked up at Bucky across the field: he hadn’t clocked Steve. He’d just been thinking about him independently.

Steve tucked the phone back into his pocket, schooled the dopey grin from his face, and went over.

They were spread out on and around two big checkered picnic blankets, one red and one blue. Bucky was sitting in the grass, leaning back against the trunk of a tree, wearing a thin white t-shirt, his hoodie discarded next to him. He was turning his phone over in his hand idly, not looking at it. He was also wearing sunglasses and chatting with Clint, who was sprawled on his back on the grass, twirling a stick nimbly between two fingers. And, though Steve could only see the back of her head, he knew that the dark red hair on Clint’s other side must belong to Natasha Romanoff.

When Steve arrived and said hello, Bucky smiled, and got up at once to greet him. “That was like, _magic_ ,” he said, looking Steve up and down as though making sure he was really there. “I _just_ texted you.”

Steve’s cheeks heated up at the attention. “I was just waiting over there,” he joked, with a gesture to the direction he’d come from. “Until somebody asked where I was.”

“Like if we said ‘Steve,’” Clint said from the grass, “you’d pop up and be like ‘Did someone say Steve?’”

“Yeah, exactly,” Steve said, and then: “What’s up?” Mostly to Clint, because he was the one who’d just spoken to Steve, but with half a glance at Bucky who was still standing with him. (There was something about Bucky that made it hard to look directly at him. Steve felt both comfortable and shy around him, a sharp-edged fondness.)

“How’s it going, man,” Clint greeted him.

Natasha, next to him, held her hand up and smiled. “Hey, Steve” she said, half shy, half ironic. He returned her smile, thinking about Bucky’s insistence that she knew him. She was pretty, petite, sharp edged. She was their grade, but she seemed a little older than them, a little grown up, although she was wearing just a t-shirt and hoodie over her jeans and chucks. Very normal. It was just that she was already herself, Steve thought, based on basically nothing. Like she didn’t have any growing into it to do.

“Steve! Steve!” This from the girls on the other blanket. Darcy and Jane, sitting cross-legged, talking animatedly and stopping to call his name. They waved at Steve when he raised a hand in greeting. Thor was near them, but talking to someone on his phone.

The next half hour passed pleasantly on the blankets. Steve sat and chatted with Bucky, Natasha, and Clint. Natasha started talking to him right away, even at the expense of paying attention to Clint and Bucky. She angled herself toward Steve, in fact, and kind of ignored the others. She asked him about his classes, talked about movies with him. They both liked scary movies, it turned out, and she was describing something really creepy-sounding that she was excited about, when the first strange thing happened. She was standing up, dusting herself off from the grass, because it was getting near evening and they were going to pack up the blankets soon.

Bucky and Clint stood up, too, behind her, and Bucky stepped closer to her, and her face went strange for a second. Steve was near her so he saw.

“Your phone,” Bucky said behind her. He was holding it out to her, and must have touched her back or shoulder to get her attention. The touch was what made her face change.

“Thanks,” she said, cheerfully, but there was something rueful and challenging in her look that didn’t match her voice. The two of them were standing close for only a handful of seconds, but the encounter was charged, bristling and electric, and Steve didn’t know if it was going to spill over into anger or something else entirely.

He looked away, at Clint who was spending a long moment sweeping an imaginary grass stain off of his jeans, not looking at anyone.

Steve turned deliberately from that, and shook out and folded up one of the blankets. He held it out to Darcy when she opened her hands for it. She already had a couple of water bottles and a sweater tucked under her arm, so Steve said, “I can bring it to the car for you.”

“That’s okay,” Jane said, next to Darcy with the other blanket in her arms. “We’ve got it.”

They set off together in step, traipsing confidently across the field, keeping next to each other even along the windy path they had to take as they twisted their way among all the people.

Steve talked to Thor while they were gone, mostly to avoid the other three. Thor was gregarious yet formal, kind, odd. His blonde hair fell to his chin but it didn’t look dirty or alternative or anything, not on him, with his broad shoulders and easy, big smile. It was the way Steve imagined a Scandinavian jock might look.

He asked how Steve’s weekend was going and Steve told him about the protest he was going to attend tomorrow and the work he’d done to help organize it, and Thor smiled at him. “You’re a good person. We should all care more about our environment.”

“Right,” Steve said. “I think so, too.” But he couldn’t help laughing, and to his relief Thor laughed along with him. His spirit was infectious, and Steve felt better for talking to him. Thor was the rare person where when he called you good, it made you believe it.

 

+

 

He walked with Darcy, at first, as all of them set off through the midway, the sunset just beginning to turn the scene red and gold, the colored lights on the rides and games getting brighter as the sky darkened.

She bought cotton candy and shared it with him, insisting when he said he was fine until he pulled off a strand of spun sugar and ate it as they walked. It was sweet and something like chalky in his mouth.

“I’m glad you came!” she said suddenly, as they lagged behind the others, stopping to look over a low metal fence at a little kids’ ride, teacups twirling with parents and toddlers inside.

“Me too,” Steve said, and really was. “Sorry I didn’t text you back.”

“That’s okay,” she said.

He wanted suddenly to be nice to her, to reciprocate some of what she was always offering him. “Let’s go on a ride,” he said. “You want to?”

“Sure,” she agreed. “Not this one. I know it’s for kids but it makes me sicker than anything else. I never get nauseous but the way those teacups spin—” She grimaced, her dark eyes dancing with the carnival lights.

Steve wasn’t exactly sure which rides _wouldn’t_ make him barf, honestly. He hadn’t been much for rides when he was younger. First of all he was small for his age and for many years was not tall enough to go on anything good, and for another thing it was one of those weird health situations where he knew his mom wanted him to feel normal, but she had been worried about taking him on any exciting rides, so as a result Steve had feigned disinterest in them so she wouldn’t have to tell him he wasn’t allowed to.

“Jane!” Darcy’s clear voice called across the crowd, to the other side of the strip.

Jane turned, and raised her eyebrows, listening for whatever Darcy wanted to tell her.

Darcy motioned for her to come over, but Jane gestured to Thor, who was playing the basket toss game to her left. Bucky and Clint were milling around near him so Darcy acquiesced, and led Steve across the aisle to them.

“We have to pick a ride,” Darcy told Jane.

Jane pursed her lips, appraising. “The crescent moon one is good,” she said thoughtfully.

“But the line gets so long,” Darcy said, nodding.

“The ferris wheel is the highest,” Jane said.

“But it’s kind of dull,” Darcy said.

“Ferris wheel!” Thor voted, from behind them, shooting a basket.

A complicated, silent conversation played out between Darcy and Jane. Finally, Darcy rolled her eyes, smiling, and said to Steve, “Okay, how about the ferris wheel? I know it’s kind of boring.”

“No, yeah, let’s do it,” he said. Watching the two of them was like seeing a nature documentary about a species of bird that lived only in the depths of a rainforest and had never been observed by humans before. He didn’t mind being left out of their circle of two, he was happy enough to witness it.

Bucky appeared next to them and plucked some of Darcy’s cotton candy. She allowed this, and then held it out to Jane, who waved it away.

“Are you guys hungry?” Bucky asked. “You want to go find some food?”

“After the ferris wheel?” Steve said.

Bucky made a face like _are you sure about that_ , but then he broke and laughed. “Sure, okay,” he said, with a magnanimous air. “Let’s go.”

They wound their way through the crowd to the other side of the fair, where they could see the ferris wheel spinning sedately, tall and whimsical. Natasha had disappeared between the blankets and here, lost at some point when Steve was walking with Darcy. Steve asked Bucky where she was.

His face went grumpy at once. “ _I_ don’t know,” he said, voice low enough to not be overheard by Clint and Thor, a few feet ahead. “She’s so weird.”

Steve glanced at him. He both wanted and didn’t want to know more, but curiosity won out, so unusual was it to see this dour expression on Bucky’s perpetually laughing face. “What do you mean?” he asked, shooting for casual and hearing himself miss it.

Bucky’s mouth twisted, and he gave an apologetic shrug. “I mean. I don’t know. She saw someone she knew and said she’d text us in a little bit and see where we were.”

Steve said nothing. That didn’t seem weird to him, but what did he know? There must be more to it, but Bucky dropped the subject at once, instead asking Steve if he liked corn dogs and launching into an impassioned monologue about his favorite fairground foods that seemed to have no aim but to take up conversational space. Steve let him go, making sounds of agreement when it seemed appropriate, mostly because it seemed to make Bucky feel more normal to talk.

Darcy turned to them when they were all waiting in line for the ferris wheel. Bucky was calm and good-natured again by this point, the unrest from before forgotten. “I’ve got to ride with Jane,” Darcy said to Steve. “Do you mind?”

“Oh,” he said, brow creasing. “No, course not.”

He’d expected to sit with her, though. It was true. But this was fine. The situation, if he had to guess, and piece it together from what he’d seen over Darcy’s shoulder, was that Thor had just asked Jane to sit with him and she, blushing, had replied that she couldn’t, she was sitting with Darcy, and so Darcy had to go along with this.

Darcy smiled one of her self-deprecating smiles, like, _these dummies, what am I going to do with them?_ , and turned back to Jane.

Bucky laughed at this. He seemed to have picked up what Steve had seen, and probably knew some of it from a different perspective, since he was teammates with Thor and friendly with him.

“We can ride together?” Bucky said, eyes skittering away from Steve when he looked at him.

Steve nodded, his throat suddenly dry. And the rest of the line was awkward but not unpleasant; they were quiet until the operator waved them into a seat and clinked the metal bar down over their laps.

Bucky tugged at it experimentally as the seat lifted up off the ground and they were carried backward so the next people could be loaded on. “Seems unsafe,” he pronounced.

Steve tugged at it. It lifted a couple inches and then was solid. “You could probably fall,” he allowed, “if you really tried.”

Thor and Clint were in the seat behind theirs, only Clint’s laughter audible from here. Steve craned around in his seat until he could see Jane and Darcy, too, who waved and made faces at him and Bucky.

Finally, the ride whirred to life, and their car began its long, creaky ascent up the circle. Bucky slouched in his seat and regarded Steve, eyes hooded and intense. “So,” he said, voice pregnant with meaning.

Steve raised his eyebrows. “So what?”

“You and Darcy.”

Steve shook his head. Lucky he didn’t burst out laughing. “You’re so off.”

“Really?” Bucky said, face and voice returning to normal. “I know she’s always super friendly, but...” He shrugged. “Really?” he asked one more time. When he saw Steve’s face he laughed, accepting the information. “All right, whatever,” he said, agreeably.

He jabbed Steve in the side with his elbow and pointed at something far below them. “I think that’s Becca,” he said, sitting close and trying to show Steve where she was. He smelled like clean laundry and something else, something warm and half remembered.

The whole fair spread out below them. The roofs of the community center and the public pool. The lights spinning madly under them on the small, twirling rides. _You and Natasha_ , Steve wanted to ask in return for Bucky’s question about Darcy, but didn’t. Somehow he knew it would make Bucky slide away from him on the bench seat and look downcast, and it was worth it not to know to keep Bucky at his side.

“How was the party last night?” Steve asked after another half rotation around the giant wheel.

“Oh,” Bucky flopped back in the seat, the length of his arm pressed against Steve’s. He was so warm all over. “It was cool. Sam was there for awhile. Thor was there. Oh and Bruce, actually,” he added, remembering. “But it was a lot of like, those other football players that I don’t know that well, and I guess the girls’ volleyball team and them.”

Steve, who hadn’t known the school had any such team, had no idea what group of people Bucky was talking about, but felt like he got the gist of it anyway.

“How’s your grandma?” Bucky asked, and earnestly waited for the answer.

Steve gave him a half smile. “She’s good. She said she’s coming to the fair tomorrow to play bingo.”

“Yeah?” Bucky smiled. “That’s such a classic grandma thing. I like that.”

Steve huffed a laugh. “She’s very classic grandma. She’s always baking and watching old murder mystery shows on TV.”

“Sounds fun,” Bucky said, and they smiled at each other for a long moment. And then the moment stretched thin and Bucky started to say something and stopped. But they were alone in a ferris wheel car and there was really nowhere to go. “I wanted to ask you before,” Bucky said, and Steve knew that whatever it was, it was going to be embarrassing. “Are you okay, about your mom?”

He’d half known it was coming, but the question was a fresh hurt in his chest anyway. He pressed his mouth into a thin line. He knew he was blushing a little but couldn’t do anything about it.

“I’m sorry,” Bucky said. For the question, he meant, not for Steve’s mom.

“No,” Steve said. “It’s cool. You can ask me about it.” He looked down across the fair, the colored lights and the hundreds of people. He thought of his grandma, and his mom, and Bucky, and mostly he thought that he was very happy and very lucky to be on this ferris wheel right then, all things considered. “I’m okay,” he said. “I’m still sad.”

Bucky nodded painfully. “Yeah,” he said, voice barely there. “Yeah.”

He shifted to look out at the fair too, instead of at Steve, and it wasn’t clear if he knew he was doing it, but he moved closer to Steve so their legs touched too. There was plenty of room to sit with space between them, but the ride was ending soon, and Steve stayed cuddled close to Bucky the whole rest of the way around the circle. He got out first when the operator let them off and gave Bucky a hand up.

They walked away from the ride and were quiet, as though both absorbing the events of the past few minutes, even though nothing very interesting had happened. It was just a ride.

When they found the others, Natasha was back. She waved hello to the two of them as they joined the group. Her hand made a little crescent as she tucked it back into the pocket of her hoodie.

Everyone ate after that. Darcy, who seemed mildly annoyed by everyone except Steve, stuck close to him. And he was happy to keep her company, and be seated on the end of the row of them as they sat on the curb to eat, next to and able to talk to no one but her. Particularly, he was happy about this because Bucky had withdrawn from him after the ride and was no longer walking with him or talking quietly to him. Steve was confused, or annoyed, or _something_ , but it seemed like too small of a transgression to say anything about. There was no way to go about it. So he pretended it wasn’t happening, and after they ate he said goodbye to everyone as a group, after saying goodbye to Darcy in particular during their conversation. He biked home, grateful to be flying down the roads alone.

 

+

 

Bucky and Natasha.

During the summer she had worked at the corporate chain bookstore in the strip mall. He’d come in a few times to browse, looking through the fiction shelves for ages, examining the books that interested him, flipping through their fresh pages and running a hand over their shiny covers, reading through the end matter and the beginning of the story.

Just killing time during those first long afternoons after moving in. At home, his mom was in her old paint-splattered jeans slowly fixing up the new house, standing on her tip-toes to hammer in nails. He helped her when she let him, but mostly she told him to go have fun. Go where? It was late in the summer, no time to get a job or join a team or anything, and he didn’t know anyone here.

He met Nat while she was shelving magazines, and they got to talking. A laugh sparkled behind her every sentence, secret in her throat, and Bucky was captivated at once. _Do you live around here? I just moved in. Do you want to hang out later? We can go meet up with some of my friends at the coffee shop._

And later that night, after playing Pictionary with her friends at the coffee shop, they made out in the front seats of Bucky’s car. At a certain point, Natasha squirmed out of his hands and crawled into the backseat, looking up at him after she did so with big, vulnerable eyes. He followed right after her. They touched each other in the backseat with need and with laughter, breathless with their own daring. It was easy, with her. It was perfect. Her small cold hands seared his skin long after he dropped her off at home.

This continued through the first week of her school year. Barely any time at all, but they slept together several times and had quite a bit of fun, so the memories glowed fierce and bright for Bucky.

She ended things between them kindly, but decisively.

Bucky had the sense that for her, this, between them, had been more casual than it had been for him. They were just hooking up, but he would’ve been up for more than that, if she’d wanted it.

 

+

 

At the Fall Fair, Steve left abruptly, was how Bucky would’ve described it. One minute he was there, and then he was saying goodbye and leaving. Darcy looked a little listless after that. She was usually chipper so it stood out when she wasn’t. He thought it was not so much Steve’s exit—Bucky believed him that there wasn’t anything between them, they were easy enough together—as the presence of the rest of them that was making her tired.

He felt vaguely bad about this. He knew he wasn’t being the most fun person to be around. He was focused almost exclusively on talking to Clint, who was easy to talk to but seemed mildly confused at Bucky’s sudden interest in him. It was just that Natasha appeared to be such good friends with him. And Bucky felt sort of bad about using Clint as an example of someone he didn’t like the other day to Steve. So he was trying to make both of those things go away by liking Clint _a lot_.

After Steve’s departure, the night became unbalanced quickly, and by the time Darcy, too, said she was thinking of going home, he sensed that the night was over. Darcy was driving Jane and Thor; Clint said he was walking; and Bucky offered Natasha a ride.

She looked at him for a second too long. He knew, _knew_ , she was annoyed with him. But he also knew she probably didn’t want to wait for one of her parents to come and get her, and she agreed, and everyone split up.

In the car, he started the engine, looked at her, and said, “Did you have a good time?”

She shrugged slightly, but she pulled back the corner of her mouth in a very _Natasha_ smile. “Yeah, it was fun.” They smiled at each other and she dropped her eyes. “I’m glad Steve came,” she said. “Did you guys have a good time?”

Bucky looked out the window. He should drive out of the parking lot and leave, just like Steve had left a while ago. “Yeah, I guess,” he said finally, unable to get any words like _him_ or _us_ into a sentence he could say to her. It was impossible to talk to her about Steve, Bucky was suddenly aware, it would simply never happen.

But, but. She was here, now, in his car. She had not left early, or with Clint.

And then something happened that Bucky was going to regret for a long time. He leaned forward, touched the side of her face with his hand, and stared into her eyes. She startled at first, her gasp soundless. He searched her eyes. She was as unmoving as a deer in the road staring into the headlights of a car.

And then she softened, she accepted the gentleness, the neediness of Bucky’s position. When this kindness came over her face, she pressed her lips together with sympathy and turned the soft skin of her cheek against Bucky’s palm. He touched the side of her face and they both leaned in, and then they kissed each other softly, tenderly. She pulled back after a few seconds, and when she kept her eyes cast down instead of looking at him, he knew he was in for it.

“I don’t want to do that,” she said quietly. “I don’t want to get back together with you.”

“I know, I’m sorry,” he told her quickly, and meant it. “You’re so pretty and when I’m close to you—” He stopped himself, although he meant that part of it also.

He still wanted her. She was so lovely up close, her skin so taut and smooth, her lips so alien and inviting, so different from Bucky’s own. But it was true, he knew things were over between them, and he couldn’t say why he’d kissed her knowing that. He wished violently that he could take it back and take the uncomfortable look off her face. He saw, in her expression as much as her words, that he had violated her trust.

“I want to be friends with you,” she said, upset, unable to look at him. “But I can’t if you do stuff like that.”

He sat back in his seat and scrubbed a hand over his face. “I know,” he said. “I understand. I’m really sorry.” He risked a glance over at her because he wanted her to see that he meant it. “I won’t anymore.”

She said okay and he drove her home. And even though things were uncomfortable between them because of the kiss, he missed her when she got out of the car and he had to drive the rest of the way by himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NEXT TIME: We meet the other members of the Barnes family.


End file.
